The Pirate Bay has been in Zombie Pirate™ mode for months now, but one of the last remnants of its halcyon days has been sent to sea on a burning boat: their tracker—the biggest in the world—is gone.

On The Pirate Bay's blog, the decision is pitched as a step forward, away from centralized trackers to newer, decentralized systems like DHT and PEX:

Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down! It's the end of an era, but the era is no longer up2date. We have put a server in a museum already, and now the tracking can be put there as well.

Which is all well and good, but DHT support isn't in all torrent clients yet, and many cheaper routers choke on the added connection load. It remains to be seen how smoothly the transition will go—the main site is still up and searches still work, so you can go judge for yourself—but there's little doubt that The Pirate Bay, as precariously positioned as they are as a company (read: owned by a bunch of incredible sketchballs), was under external pressure to get rid of that giant, 25 million+ torrent liability of theirs.